By Daniel Chiu in Goals — Oct 7, 2020

2020 Q3 Reflection and Q4 Planning

This is a routine review of my progress toward my 2020 New Year’s Resolutions. I engage in this review process quarterly. You can find Q1’s review here, and Q2’s review here.

Summary

For Q3, I give myself a C:

Started consulting for Karat
Took on 2 students for The Spike Lab
Logged 44 hours of volunteer work for Vote Forward
Completed the Duolingo Chinese course
Learned between 450 and 500 new Chinese words and phrases, putting me now fairly solidly in the lower intermediate (B1) band of proficiency
Reached ~650 total Japanese words, bringing me within reach of N5 proficiency
Read 12 books, bringing my total up to 42 / 52 for the year
Mostly maintained a weight of ~145 lbs with body fat hovering between 14-15% while making gains in the gym
Continued exploring a relationship with my Taiwanese girlfriend
Obtained a Taiwan Employment Gold Card, granting me a 3-year residency visa and open work permit in Taiwan
- I suspect I’ll stay for at least another year given the pandemic, so I am starting to consider longer-term living arrangements, but I haven’t yet committed to staying for the full 3 years.
Started a new herb graveyard on my roof. RIP plants :’(.
Did a short voice acting gig for an upcoming game related to the Slam Dunk anime series

Lessons and observations:

I need to be more disciplined about stopping work for the day early enough to give myself space for everything else in life, including friends, a little bit of sanctioned play time, and a more general sense of wellbeing.
Sometimes, when you can’t see or feel the progress you’re making, it’s because you’re examining it with too big a magnifying glass! Step back and look at the big picture on a longer timescale.

In Q4:

Likely staying in Taiwan for the next ~year as the world shows no signs of normalizing anytime soon.
I have decided to put Tribe on hold indefinitely due to the pandemic and to step back and think more about how my projects connect to my purpose.
I’ll be continuing to consult for Karat this quarter.
I’ll be continuing to coach students for The Spike Lab this quarter.
I’m scaling back my volunteer involvement in politics, as the 2020 US Presidential Election comes to a close on November 3.
- My obligations to VoteForward will end by October 17.
- I plan to do a little bit of phone banking for key political races through Swing Left.
Will be focusing on balance, and trying to create enough space in my life to get lots of work done while also maintaining friendships and personal wellbeing.
Will also be focusing on purpose, and identifying a number of projects to potentially start exploring beginning in 2021.
- I’m dropping many of my other goals to make room for this!

Q3 Reflection

I started out this quarter telling people that my life is very full, but also very fulfilling–my way of saying that, though I have a lot on my plate with a full-time consulting client, a part-time job, and a volunteering gig, I am quite happy to be doing everything I’m doing. On the whole, I am still glad that I’m doing all of these things, but I think now, 12 weeks later, having worked part if not all of most weekends, I’m finally willing to admit that a part of me is just plain tired. Coming into this review, I feel a little like an old train just barely making it into station on momentum after running out of steam halfway through the journey.

What’s more, though it’s been a very productive quarter–I logged close to 60 hours/week many weeks, with single-day logs typically falling somewhere between 8 and 10 hours, maxing out at around 11 or 12, all excluding the ~1.5 hours of additional unlogged time I spend each day clearing my Anki reviews–I simultaneously feel a lot like I didn’t make much progress on my goals. There hasn’t been a lot of mental space to pursue many of my personal goals, so there’s been a lot of fall off, especially in the latter half of this quarter: I definitely haven’t made it to the gym regularly; progress learning Chinese has slowed to a crawl; and a lot of the things I originally hoped I’d spend time on the weekends doing, like writing, or calling my family, or honing my engineering skills through books and exercises, just have not happened.

I have also clearly not been getting enough rest this quarter, and am starting to feel like I’m not getting my social needs met. Some of this is likely my own fault, and can’t solely be blamed on my workload–I’ve historically been pretty bad at balancing work and life, and I’m pretty sure I’ve inherited some of my mother’s workaholic tendencies and habits. These days I find I tend to either over-work (when I have clients) or over-life (when I struggle to keep myself as accountable for my own work).

Over the course of the quarter, I’ve tried to resolve this by consolidating weekend work onto Sunday as much as possible so I can feel comfortable taking Saturday off. Sunday has also turned into a “lazy work day”, wherein I plan to work, but, since most of Sunday’s work is typically volunteer-related, I put less pressure on myself to avoid distractions. Over time, I’ve also gone from aiming for a full day of work on Sunday, to aiming for closer to a half day of work sheerly out of necessity. Nevertheless, since Sunday remains a “work day”, and since Saturday has mostly been reserved for my girlfriend, I haven’t made much time to make new friends here in Taipei, or deepen my existing relationships, a fact which is starting to contribute to a sense of social isolation or alienation, and a contraction of my comfort zone wrt to social engagements (i.e. I’m naturally tending to become more introverted / hermit-like, which I don’t love). If you’re a friend reading this and wondering why we haven’t hung out in awhile, this is why, and I sincerely apologize :(.

It also doesn’t help that, towards the end of this quarter, some friends convinced me to get back into League of Legends (LoL), a video game that I played a lot in high school. I sometimes say that I was addicted to this game back then, though, given that I still got into college I’m not sure it’s totally fair to say that. What I can say for sure, though, is that with the hundreds (hopefully not thousands) of hours I spent playing LoL in high school, I probably could have picked up a new skill, learned a language, or completed a fun and interesting independent project.

I largely quit the game when I got to college because of its huge suck on my time (and because I was dating someone who clearly didn’t approve). I steered clear of it for a nice long time and, since the game changes quickly, I never felt a strong desire to get back into it, knowing how much time it would take me to get back up to speed. Now that I’ve been re-introduced to LoL, and paid down much of the time to get caught-up, much of the non-work time that I might otherwise spend on my personal goals or social visits has instead been spent playing the game.

I am, however, currently more inclined to believe that LoL is a symptom than a cause–in the past, I have found that video games have been an escape / pressure release mechanism for me when I am in a state of extreme distress or discomfort (e.g. I was going through a lot when I lived in Morocco, and I experienced a similar bout of video game escapism back then, combined with a sense of stagnation wrt my goals and personal growth). I imagine this is my version of trying to find a semi-mindless escape from pain or crisis, much like the stereotypical instinct to plop down in front of the television after a long day of work…

The fatigue and a growing concern that I may be stagnating outside of work has sometimes left me feeling less than great these last few weeks. I am therefore very much relieved to be taking some time off to do this review, and to push the giant red “reset” button in time to re-strategize before the end of the year.

As usual, though, in reviewing the goals set out at the beginning of last quarter, I clearly vastly overcommitted myself. I think part of the problem here is that, while I knew I would consider taking on a new consulting client in Q3, I didn’t actually have one when I did my Q2 review. Ironically, the act of posting my Q2 review and making known that I’m open to more consulting work this year is what led to my quickly closing a consulting contract in the second week of Q3.

I had to quickly re-adjust at the beginning of Q3 after landing a new consulting contract, being accepted as a volunteer senior software engineer with Vote Forward, and being pushed into an accelerated timeline to take on my first student for The Spike Lab. My first indication that something might not be right was when, during a trip to Taichung with my girlfriend, I found myself stressing out about the time commitment the workout plans I had selected were requiring (~1-2 hours/day), and how that might affect my ability to deliver quality work. I ended up changing my exercise plan to something more manageable–~1 hour 3 times a week.

As I look through a lot of these goals, some of them seem somewhat redundant with having an active consulting client, and that’s something I should likely have tried to realize ahead of time. For example, spending time trying to join TopTal or preparing for any kind of engineering interviews is completely unnecessary while I have an active client since these are things that are geared towards improving long-term dealflow for my consulting business, and nothing improves long-term dealflow more than building my reputation through strong execution.

On the personal side, relationship-wise things have been going well! At ~6 months, my current girlfriend is now the longest relationship I’ve been in since college. That’s been coming with its own set of fears and complexities, but we’ve been working through them together, and I’ve enjoyed what feels to me like a very mature approach to our relationship and exploring whether or not we’re right for each other. I think the jury is still out on a number of things, and she and I have talked about them, but at the moment I feel pretty positively about the relationship. I also think that, given how understanding she’s been of the pressure I tend to put on myself, and the workload I’ve taken on this quarter, if anything she’s made my life better, and helped to stabilize my mood.

All-in-all, I think I left Q3 feeling like I might be failing to meet important metrics on my goals, and my initial gut feeling is that I probably earned a D+/C-, but given that some goals should have moved around to accommodate the new reality, perhaps I did better than I realized. I’m also probably falling victim to recency bias since I better remember the latter half of the quarter and how rough a ride that was, and I’ve mostly forgotten that the first half of the quarter actually mostly went OK.

Q3 Quantitative Review

Based on the below, I’m giving myself a C for the quarter.

Here’s a categorical breakdown:

Consulting / Productivity: A+
Reading: A-
Language Sudies: A
Health / Fitness: B
Become more politically active: B
Improving relationships with family: C-
Meditation / Mindfulness: F
Independent Professional Development: F
Writing: F

Here’s a detailed breakdown:

Launch a successful project

Launch a successful project
- OKR: Earn no more profit from coaching and consulting than the annual Foreign Earned Income Tax Exclusion limit ($107,600).
  - Q2: Added this OKR.
  - Q3: On track to exceed this, and will likely only not exceed if the status of my contract with Karat changes. I’m not expecting any changes here between now and the end of the year.
- OKR: Release a new version of Tribe with updates for COVID-19
  - Q2: Added this OKR.
  - Q3: Unlikely to accomplish this unless the status of my contract with Karat changes, and I throw the remaining time this year into Tribe. I’m not expecting the status of my contract with Karat to change between now and the end of the year.
- Habit: Work on projects 6 hours a day
  - Q1: I’d give myself 50-60% compliance. I’ve had a number of days where I felt like I didn’t quite hit the 6 hour goal, and then never made-up the time. Hoping my new implementation plan will help me to stay focused and motivated.
  - Q2: I crushed this most of the time. Doing client work this quarter has helped me to realize that I can actually do close to 9 hours a day of work and still get all of my other personal goals done so long as I’m really focused about it. I still struggle a little to apply this same work ethic to my own work, but when client work is involved it’s never an issue.
  - Q3: Absolutely crushed this. I logged close to 60 hours/week many weeks, with single-day logs typically falling somewhere between 8 and 10 hours, maxing out at around 11 or 12. I expect the trend to continue for Q4, since I will be maintaining a similar workload between clients and coaching. If anything, I actually need to work less at this point haha.

Grow my consulting business
- OKR: Join TopTal
  - Q2: Added this OKR.
  - Q3: I haven’t spent any time thinking about this. With an active consulting project, I probably shouldn’t have to.
- OKR: Complete a professional project related to machine learning / artificial intelligence / data science
  - Q2: Added this OKR.
  - Q3: I haven’t spent any time thinking about this. With an active consulting project, I probably shouldn’t have to.
- Habit: Do a practice problem on HackerRank daily
  - Q2: Added this OKR.
  - Q3: I was doing this for the first few weeks, then as work picked up I dropped this because it was requiring an hour a day and I couldn’t spare the time.
Improve my software engineering skills
- OKR: Read Clean Code by Robert C. Martin
  - Q3: I’m about halfway through this book, but most of that progress was made long ago.
- OKR: Read Design Patterns by The “Gang of Four”
  - Q3: Started reading this book, but haven’t gotten very far.
- OKR: Read Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture by Martin Fowler
  - Q3: Started reading this book, but haven’t gotten very far.
- OKR: Master dynamic programming (DP)
  - Q3: I’ve spent 0 time on this this quarter.
- Habit: Every weekend, spend 2-3 hours working on something that hones my software engineering skills
  - Q3: I spent 0 time on this this quarter.
Language learning
- Learn Japanese
  - OKR: Memorize the first 600-1000 most common words in Japanese.
    - Q1: I haven’t started a concerted effort to take words off this list yet. So far, I’m mostly farming vocabulary from Duolingo, which I think is preferable.
    - Q2: I still haven’t purposefully started this.
    - Q3: I haven’t been doing much for this other than my Japanese Core 10k sentence flashcards, but I just did a vocabulary check based on JLPT vocabulary lists, and found that I’m hovering around ~650 Japanese words right now, with nearly 80% coverage of the N5 level (lowest recognized proficiency). My actual command of the language feels like it’s lagging, however, since I still have not done a lot of studying around grammar.
  - Habit: Add 3 new Japanese Core 10k sentences each day
    - Q2: Added this habit.
    - Q3: I was pretty good about this! 3 new sentences a day is a pretty small commitment, so I never felt like doing this was a big burden.
  - Habit: Add at least 5 new Japanese vocabulary Anki cards a day
    - Q2: Added this habit.
    - Q3: I didn’t do this one virtually at all. I quickly realized that doing this would push me from 50 Japanese reviews a day to 100 Japanese reviews a day, and I was nervous about making that jump because I felt it would add a lot of extra stress.
  - Habit: Every day, make grammar and example sentence flashcards for 1 already-completed Duolingo lesson
    - Q2: Added this habit.
    - Q3: I started this, but dropped off as my workload ramped up. There are still 17/42 Duolingo lessons that haven’t been converted into flashcards. This is still do-able by the end of the year if I put in a little effort.
- Learn Chinese
  - OKR: Spend 3 months in Chinese-speaking countries
    - I’ve spent literally the entire year in Taiwan haha…
  - OKR: Complete the Duolingo Chinese program
    - Q2: I haven’t been doing this at all this quarter.
    - Q2: There are about 17 “skills” left to complete on Duolingo. For Chinese, the average number of lessons per skills is ~3. This means that I should be able to easily finish this at a rate of 1 lesson per day for ~51 days.
    - Q3: Complete!
  - OKR: Reach 3000 words in Chinese
    - Q2: Added this OKR.
    - Q2: I did a self-diagnostic based on vocabulary lists published by Taiwan for the TOCFL, and I’m at about ~2000 words now, where ~8000 are required for “fluency.” (Note: A “word” is a combination of Chinese characters. One can know vastly more “words” in Chinese than one knows characters, since different combinations of the same characters can form different “words.”)
    - Q3: A similar diagnostic put me at ~2500 words and phrases in Chinese for an improvement of ~450-500 words this quarter, and this despite not always adding a full 30 new cards each day. I think I’m on track to reach in the range of 3000 words by the end of the year if the trend continues.
  - Habit: Add at least 30 new Chinese Anki cards a day for the duration of my stay in Taiwan
    - Q2: Added this Habit.
    - Q3: I fell off on this a bit as work picked up, but was adding between 10 and 30 cards most days.
  - Habit: Complete 1 Duolingo Chinese lesson daily
    - Q2: Added this habit.
    - Q3: Finished Duolingo’s Chinese track!
- Habit: Complete Anki reviews daily.
  - Q2: I had a week or two where I was behind due to client work, but I’ve caught back up, and I’ve gotten into a pretty good cadence for this. I’m finding doing ~100 cards in the morning when I wake up, then ~50 before lunch and ~50 after, then ~50 before dinner and ~50 after, puts me in a pretty good place where I never reach the end of my day panicked that I haven’t started studying (which usually leads to losing sleep, and is kind of a vicious cycle that leads to Anki burnout).
  - Q3: I’ve had a couple of days here and there where I was too exhausted to finish everything, but I haven’t had any long stretches where I just haven’t done my reviews. This quarter, in addition to the trick I discovered Q2 around distributing reviews throughout the day, I found that doing reviews while walking on a treadmill often keeps me focused (and allows me to get some exercise!). Doing reviews in 25-minute pomodoros also helps, since I can usually expect that it will only take ~3 pomodoros to finish my Anki cards for the day.
Improve my health
- Get back into shape
  - Get lean
    - Reach 10% body fat
      - Habit: Measure body composition every day so I can tell if current efforts are working
        
        Q1: I’ve barely missed a day of doing this.
        
        Q2: Still going strong here.
        
        Q3: Going a little less strong, but generally doing this 80-90% of the time.
    - Habit: Take a full set of body circumference measurements once a week
      - Q2: I did pitifully on this, with only 2 measurements recorded this quarter. Normally I do this over the weekend, but I think I got thrown off track by working a few weekends in a row.
      - Q3: I did better on this, with 6 measurements recorded this quarter, but am still generally failing to do this consistently. I think the issue now is that Saturday is cheat day, and often kind of a weird day for me. If I don’t do this first thing in the morning on Saturday, I lose the opportunity to do it for the week because I eat so much on Saturdays that it would actually skew my data haha. I think the solution here might be to move my measurement day to Friday, when I’m less likely to get distracted.
  - OKR: Find a training program I feel I can trust and stick to it unless body composition results show I’m not moving toward where I want to go. Re-evaluate programs every ~12 weeks.
    - Q1: I chose this program and stuck to it pretty closely.
    - Q2: I chose a half marathon program and stuck with it closely, with the exception of one week where I went on a long vacation. I’ll be completing my half marathon “race” the weekend of this review :).
    - Q3: I started out doing the Warrior Elite Workout Program, but quickly had to switch to Stronglifts 5×5 to save time. Sustained two minor injuries this quarter, likely due to not properly warming up, and generally fell off on this toward the end of the quarter.
  - OKR: Find a diet plan and stick to it long enough to evaluate results.
    - Q1: I would give myself a 60% compliance rate with my diet haha…
    - Q2: I would give myself a 70-75% compliance rate with my diet, and things seem to be working well!
    - Q3: I would give myself a 60-70% compliance rate with my diet. No significant gains this quarter, but no significant regressions, either.
  - Habit: Exercise at least 3 days a week
    - Q1: I’m easily doing closer to 5-6 days a week.
    - Q2: I’m still doing closer to 5-6 days a week and crushing this.
    - Q3: I was aiming for closer to 3 days a week, and probably made it to the gym 3 days a week 60% of weeks this quarter. I suppose if I average this out with Q1 and Q2 I’m still doing OK?
Learn to talk to attractive women
- OKR: Delete all dating apps, and don’t use them for the entire year
  - Q1: I’ve caught myself kind of tempted to download these once or twice, but on the whole I’m finding I’m quite happy without them.
  - Q2: I’m in a relationship right now, so this isn’t really applicable :P…
  - Q3: Still in a relationship. Still not applicable.
Read more
- OKR: Read 52 books
  - Q1: 17/13 books
  - Q2: 30/26 books
  - Q3: 42/39 books
    - Highlights
      - Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin
      - The Dichotomy of Leadership by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin
      - Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss
      - Money: Master the Game by Tony Robbins
      - Start with Why by Simon Sinek
- Learn to speed read
  - OKR: Eliminate subvocalization while reading
  - Habit: For at least 3 months, spend 10 minutes using speed reading training software each day
    - Q1: I had very high compliance with this for 2 months. Then dropped off.
    - Q2: I spent no time on this this quarter.
    - Q3: I spent no time on this this quarter.
  - Habit: Take a reading speed test every week or two to measure progress

- Habit: Read at least 2 pages a day
  - Q1: I was good about this for about a month, then started to totally blow it off.
  - Q2: Was also pretty bad about this this quarter, though I have recently picked up the habit of reading a few pages before bed again.
  - Q3: Despite my good intentions, this barely happened this quarter.
- Habit: Each morning after I make my bed, make sure my Kindle is charged and place it on my pillow.
  - Q2: Added this habit.
  - Q3: I haven’t actually been putting it on my pillow, but rather by the side of my bed, where it’s actually much easier to forget about it.
- Habit: Every evening, get in bed 30 minutes before my actual intended bedtime. Before I remove my Kindle from my pillow, make sure to read a few pages.
  - Q2: Added this habit.
  - Q3: Definitely wasn’t disciplined about bedtime. I often worked right up until it was time to sleep. I’m not sure I can say that doing so significantly changed my work outcomes. In fact, doing so probably just contributed to my feeling more tired through the week–I was probably even less efficient / productive as a result.
Deepen my mindfulness practice
- Meditate more (aim for once a day; consistency matters more than duration)
  - Habit: Use Headspace to meditate every day shortly after waking up
    - Q1: Near 100% compliance
    - Q2: Near 0% compliance. I missed a few days early in the quarter, and then kind of abandoned the habit :/.
    - Q3: Near 0% compliance. I go through small spurts where I do this, but usually forget. Lately I’ve been feeling like I really need more practice being present and mindful–there have been times where I’ve felt deeply, deeply distracted or stressed out.
Write more
- OKR: Write one blog post per new city/country I live in
  - Q1: I still owe the world a blog post about Mexico City, which I’m still drafting.
  - Q2: I still haven’t taken the time to finish up my Mexico City post :/. Perhaps I’ll try to spend some time on that this weekend if I finish my review quickly.
  - Q3: No movement on this :(.
- OKR: Finally write the blog post I’ve been meaning to write about “ideal love” theory
- Habit: Write at least 100 words every weekend
  - Q1: I’ve done this most weekends, though again the last month of Q1 I started to fall off the cart.
  - Q2: I haven’t been intentional about doing this lately. Some of this was that I was working weekends for about a month.
  - Q3: I’ve also been working weekends this quarter. No movement here.
Improve my relationship with my immediate family
- OKR: Find an online therapist I like to help me navigate difficult emotional issues involving family relationships
- Habit: Call each family member weekly
  - Q1: Good adherence.
  - Q2: Haven’t done this nearly as much lately… also, currently taking some time away from my father.
  - Q3: Haven’t done this a whole lot this quarter. There was a period where my sister had COVID-19 and I was calling regularly, but I’ve generally been too busy on the weekends to maintain this.
- Habit: Discuss progress on family relationships with a therapist weekly
  - Q1: My therapy sessions have been kind of all over the place. I’ve maybe talked about my family in 2 or 3 out of nearly 10 to 12 sessions. I guess I have lots of other things to talk about :P.
  - Q2: I’ve had a lot more time with my therapist to discuss my family relationships now, and I feel like I’m really starting to examine the deeper issues. There hasn’t been a tangible change in my family relationships yet, but I’m excited to be doing the hard work.
  - Q3: No big changes… therapy sessions haven’t been super focused on this this quarter. I’ve been distant from my father for a little while now. I do think I’ve learned things about how to deal with my parents, but I haven’t had much time / opportunity to practice them lately.
Become more politically active
- Habit: Spend 4-8 hours each week on political activities
  - Q2: Added this habit.
  - Q3: I did something closer to ~4, maybe a little less each week for Vote Forward. This was as much as I could manage.

Q4 Planning

How do I plan to address all of this in Q4? If I were to choose two words to serve as the theme for the rest of 2020, they would be purpose and balance. In fact, I would not be surprised if these two words ultimately become the theme of 2021, since that’s just around the corner now.

Purpose

Now that I’ve been coaching students for a few months through The Spike Lab (TSL), I’m starting to zero-in on a new theory for why I’ve had such a hard time staying focused in my own entrepreneurial pursuits.

Through TSL, much of the early work I do with my students centers around helping them understand their identities, and begin to communicate purpose. We do this because we ultimately want students’ projects to be an expression of their identity, and in service of a purpose that affects other people. Why? Because working on projects that are closely aligned with these aspects tends to be deeply meaningful, and contributes to self-motivation, excitement, and perseverance despite the challenges (and, yes, often early failures) we expect students to experience as their projects progress.

Up until now, I’ve had a loose sense of purpose, but I don’t think I’ve ever really taken the time to communicate it very clearly, or to explore other possible avenues of purpose that energize me. I think that this lack of clarity, and potentially an overly self-centric (rather than others-centric) sense of purpose could be the reason why I’ve often had so much trouble getting myself to focus in and stay self-accountable in my own entrepreneurial pursuits.

As I’ve been running my students through various exercises, it’s occurred that I, too, might benefit from going through a version of the program I’m creating for them. To that end, I’m going to make it a priority in Q4 to explore these questions, and brainstorm projects and ideas that connect to my identity and purpose in meaningful ways. I’d like to come into 2021 with a number of new interesting ideas that I’m excited to explore!

Balance

From reflection on this quarter, I think the need for balance is obvious. I likely need to either: 1) come to terms with the sacrifices I’m making, grit my teeth, and just hold out until November 3 (i.e. Election Day, when I can finally, in good conscience, drop my volunteering gig and fully reclaim my weekend) or 2) potentially drop some commitments and make some tangible changes to my schedule, habits, and mindset to promote a more holistic sense of wellbeing.

Since option 1 doesn’t really require any change (just suffering haha), I’ll instead examine option 2. If I’m thinking about what (if anything) to drop, I think it’s important that I list things out in order of priority:

Maintaining existing learning through Anki
1. Non-negotiable. There’s just too much sunk cost here to give this up. Though I gripe about it sometimes, and even joke that I’m a “slave to Anki”, it has definitely accelerated my learning and improved my retention.
2. Time commitment: ~1 hour/day
Maintaining health and fitness through exercise
1. Non-negotiable. Nothing else really matters if I’m not healthy or fit enough to enjoy my life and hobbies.
2. Time commitment: at least ~3-4 hours/week (~3 1-hour sessions)
Maintaining enough space in my life to build new friendships, and honor and strengthen existing ones.
1. Non-negotiable (?). This is something that probably should be non-negotiable, since failing to honor this tends to have an outsized negative impact on my wellbeing. However, this is often the first thing that falls off when I get busy, and usually gets prioritized far below work, sometimes for extended periods of time. Being too busy to see people for a couple weeks at a time? Probably acceptable. Being too busy to see people for most of a quarter? Not so much.
2. Time commitment: ~2-3 hours/week
Coaching for The Spike Lab
1. This work connects very tightly to my sense of purpose, is extremely fulfilling, and is giving me an awesome practice ground to learn more about what it means to discover purpose and express authenticity. It’s also giving me an awesome new avenue for honing my entrepreneurial skills (i.e. by providing advice to students on how to unblock / validate their ideas)
2. Time commitment: 4-5 hours/week with a caseload of 2 students, though I know TSL wants me to take on closer to 3 or 4 in an ideal world. I have some control over this, however.
Ongoing consulting work for Karat
1. Karat is dealing with some very interesting engineering problems around architecture and team scaling. I’m finding I’m really enjoying finding solutions to these kinds of problems, and am learning a lot in the process!
2. Time commitment: ~40 hours/week.
Learning Chinese
1. This tends to be an important goal for me, and is especially important because I live in a country where the native language is not English.
2. Time commitment: at least ~30 minutes/day
Volunteering ahead of the 2020 election
1. Time commitment: ~4 hours/week
Other 2020 personal goals

I think things are really coming down to a trade-off between volunteering and having just a little more time/space to work on my other goals and priorities. While I continue to volunteer, I think I can reasonably expect that I won’t have time for the following goals:

Improve my software engineering skills:
- Habit: Every weekend, spend 2-3 hours working on something that hones my software engineering skills
Improve my relationship with my immediate family
- Habit: Call each family member weekly

Continuing to consult for Karat also comes with some trade-offs:

Launch a successful project
- OKR: Release a new version of Tribe with updates for COVID-19
Grow my consulting business
- OKR: Join TopTal
- OKR: Complete a professional project related to machine learning / artificial intelligence / data science
- Habit: Do a practice problem on HackerRank daily

Though it should be noted that likely the single best thing I can do to grow my consulting business at any point is to knock the ball out of the park for any existing clients. Many of the other things I had wanted to do here are only relevant when I don’t already have an existing client.

Both my volunteering work and my consulting work are also incurring a trade-off against having more time and space to be social. Volunteering work has an outsized impact here, since it takes an obvious chunk out of my weekend that would otherwise be spent on relaxation, friends, or personal goals. Nevertheless, it is worth considering that I also haven’t entirely figured out how best to balance my needs during the week with a demanding job, either (this was true at Palantir as well).

In planning for Q4, both my volunteering work and my consulting work present major decision points. Bringing either to a close would free up time for important goals or personal projects respectively.

Volunteering

For the last quarter, I’ve been contributing time to Vote Forward as a volunteer senior software engineer. I’ve appreciated the opportunity to apply my professional skills to an issue that’s important to me. It’s also been interesting to work with Vote Forward’s codebase–as an organization that’s built up its code through the patchwork contribution of many volunteers and a few core full-time staff, their codebase faces some unique and interesting challenges.

However, as I’ve increasingly been finding, I don’t have as much energy and bandwidth to contribute here as I had hoped. Vote Forward’s big election-related event is their Big Send on October 17, at which time all handwritten letters that volunteers have been writing will be sent out to voters around the country. Since I’ve only ever really been able to contribute to Vote Forward on Sundays, I think that this leaves me with one more Sunday with which I can contribute to their cause before this major date. After that, if I’d like to continue volunteering to support 2020 election outcomes, I’ll need to do so through a different avenue.

I’ve decided that starting the weekend of October 17 I’ll switch from volunteering for Vote Forward to making calls for campaigns in Super States through Swing Left. There are a couple of factors involved in this decision:

I’ve already sacrificed to put time into finding ways to help with this election cycle. Even if I haven’t been able to put in as much time as I initially thought I could, and even if I can’t put that much more time into this going forward, I still think I should see the election through in some capacity.
Relatively speaking, writing software requires larger and less predictable chunks of time to make meaningful contributions than I imagine making calls (or other similar forms of volunteer) will.
I am somewhat curious to just experience what it’s like to make calls for an election.

I think I’ll leave the actual amount of time I contribute after October 17 flexible, however. It is my hope that I can start reclaiming some time and energy to begin recovering some semblance of balance in other areas.

Consulting

Last quarter I opened myself up to more consulting work, with the idea that I’d potentially build a larger safety net to weather the pandemic and any economic fallout it may bring. At the same time, I set myself a financial limit on the amount of money I’d allow myself to earn in service of that goal. I also told myself that I’d find time to finish a version of Tribe, my previous personal project.

Right now, I’m set to exceed my stated limit significantly in the coming quarter, so long as the status of my current contract doesn’t change. I’ve decided to let that happen for a few reasons:

I’ve decided to put Tribe down indefinitely.
1. Based on the way the pandemic has been going, I don’t foresee travel fully re-opening anytime soon, and the effort required to adapt Tribe to today’s world would be colossal, given that the pandemic essentially wiped out Tribe’s original reason for existing. (Most digital nomads are hunkered down somewhere, and aren’t considering large or frequent moves.)
2. I think I’ve identified that my desire to finish Tribe was really more me falling victim to the sunk cost fallacy than me making a sound business decision.
3. If I ever do pick Tribe up again, I’d like to make sure I have a good handle on how it relates to my purpose! I have some ideas here, but I think I need to clarify my purpose statements first.
Based on where Karat’s technology and technology team are right now, I think it makes sense for me to stay for a little while longer. At the very least, I’d like to get them to a relatively stable place where they can thrive without my help, or potentially help them hire someone to replace me.
1. In the meantime, there are lots of opportunities to learn and grow in my role with Karat!
My previous employer, Palantir, just went public. I still have some stock options that I’m deciding what to do with… if I choose to exercise, I may require some additional liquidity to do so.
If I do end up with extra income this year, I can still reduce my taxable income by making some large and soon-necessary business purchases like upgrading my technology.

This is subject to change, but my plan for now is to continue to work with Karat through the end of the year, provided they continue to need me that long. At the same time, I’m hoping to spend time thinking more about purpose and brainstorming ideas. The goal will be to be ready to return to my own work by the beginning of 2021, though exactly when I transition from consulting to my own work will depend a lot on the situation on the ground.

Since I struggle with balance, it’s worth my reflecting a little bit here on how I’m going to be more intentional about this in conjunction with my continued consulting work. My approach this quarter is going to focus on a few ideas:

Stronger boundaries around when I start and stop working on a given day.
1. This is intended to ensure that I don’t miss my bedtime in order to push to complete something that isn’t urgent. Missing my bedtime to get more work done in a day, tends to just leave less time or energy available to work the next day. It’s usually a net negative, even if it feels like outcomes are produced more quickly.
2. I’ve elaborated more on this in the Risk Mitigations section, below.
Feeling more comfortable stopping after a certain number of hours, rather than pushing to maximize hours each day.
1. This is the opposite of a problem I once had in keeping myself focused to do personal work, where I needed to impose a lower limit on how much work I needed to do to feel OK about what I accomplished in a day.
2. Now, I need to impose an upper limit on how much work I need to do to feel OK about putting things down until tomorrow.
3. I think something in the realm of 8-10 hours of logged time each day feels OK to me. I probably shouldn’t be logging 11-12 hour days without good reason to–working this much is probably incurring latent costs to future productivity, and overall sense of balance and well-being.
Giving myself the freedom to spend a few hours a week on social visits during the week without feeling guilty.
1. E.g. Getting coffee or lunch with a friend, or catching up with someone over video chat. Normally doing these things makes me feel “behind” because I sacrificed work time to do it. In the interest of balance, I think I should flip this, and consider time not spent doing these things in a given week as bonus work time rather than sacrificed work time.

Changes to 2020 Goals

Here’s how my goals are affected by changing conditions in Q4:

Launch a successful project / Grow my consulting business
- Given that I plan to continue work for Karat through Q4, I’m reasonably going to expect that I won’t have time or need to work on my own projects or to do any kind of outside professional development geared towards improving consulting dealflow. (e.g. TopTal and HackerRank)
Become more politically active
- Vote Forward’s Big Send happens on October 17.
- The election will be over by November 3rd.
- I plan to scale down my political activity past these dates to return to focusing on other things.
Purpose-driven focus
- To give myself time and space to think about purpose and identity, I will be pairing down or dropping goals that don’t support this, and adding a few goals / OKRs to track this.
Exercise
- I’ve sustained a few minor injuries in the gym. I think it’s time that I considered getting some real coaching for weight training.

Here’s how I’m adjusting my goals to compensate (items in green are being added, items in red are being removed):

Launch a successful project
- OKR: Complete The Spike Lab purpose and identity exercises for myself
- OKR: Brainstorm at least 100 project ideas related to my purpose, identities, and interests
- OKR: Identify 2-3 projects to explore and prototype starting in 2021
- OKR: Earn no more profit from coaching and consulting than the annual Foreign Earned Income Tax Exclusion limit ($107,600).
- OKR: Release a new version of Tribe with updates for COVID-19
- Habit: Work on projects 6 hours a day
Grow my consulting business
- OKR: Obtain a glowing review / referral from Karat, my current client
- OKR: Join TopTal
- OKR: Complete a professional project related to machine learning / artificial intelligence / data science
- Habit: Do a practice problem on HackerRank daily
Improve my software engineering skills
- OKR: Read Clean Code by Robert C. Martin
- OKR: Read Design Patterns by The “Gang of Four”
- OKR: Read Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture by Martin Fowler
- OKR: Master dynamic programming (DP)
- Habit: Every weekend, spend 2-3 hours working on something that hones my software engineering skills
Language learning
- Learn Japanese
  - OKR: Memorize the first 600-1000 most common words in Japanese.
  - Habit: Add 3 new Japanese Core 10k sentences each day
  - Habit: Add at least 5 new Japanese vocabulary Anki cards a day
  - Habit: Every day, make grammar and example sentence flashcards for 1 already-completed Duolingo lesson
- Learn Chinese
  - OKR: Spend 3 months in Chinese-speaking countries
  - OKR: Complete the Duolingo Chinese program
  - OKR: Reach 3000 words in Chinese
  - Habit: Add at least 30 new Chinese Anki cards a day for the duration of my stay in Taiwan
  - Habit: Complete 1 Duolingo Chinese lesson daily
- Habit: Complete Anki reviews daily.
Improve my health
- Get back into shape
  - Get lean
    - Reach 10% body fat
      - Habit: Measure body composition every day so I can tell if current efforts are working
    - Habit: Take a full set of body circumference measurements once a week
  - OKR: Find a training program I feel I can trust and stick to it unless body composition results show I’m not moving toward where I want to go. Re-evaluate programs every ~12 weeks.
  - OKR: Find a diet plan and stick to it long enough to evaluate results.
  - Habit: Exercise at least 3 days a week
Learn to talk to attractive women
- OKR: Delete all dating apps, and don’t use them for the entire year
Read more
- OKR: Read 52 books
- Learn to speed read
  - OKR: Eliminate subvocalization while reading
  - Habit: For at least 3 months, spend 10 minutes using speed reading training software each day
  - Habit: Take a reading speed test every week or two to measure progress
- Habit: Read at least 2 pages a day
- Habit: Each morning after I make my bed, make sure my Kindle is charged and place it on my pillow.
- Habit: Every evening, get in bed 30 minutes before my actual intended bedtime. Before I remove my Kindle from my pillow, make sure to read a few pages.
Deepen my mindfulness practice
- Meditate more (aim for once a day; consistency matters more than duration)
  - Habit: Use Headspace to meditate every day shortly after waking up
Write more
- OKR: Write one blog post per new city/country I live in
- OKR: Finally write the blog post I’ve been meaning to write about “ideal love” theory
- Habit: Write at least 100 words every weekend
Improve my relationship with my immediate family
- OKR: Find an online therapist I like to help me navigate difficult emotional issues involving family relationships
- Habit: Call each family member weekly
- Habit: Discuss progress on family relationships with a therapist weekly
Become more politically active
- Habit: Spend 4-8 hours each week on political activities
- Habit: Spend 1-4 hours each week on political activities until November 3rd

Risk Mitigations

Of my remaining habits and OKRs, the following have been identified as at risk in this quarter’s quantitative review:

Improve my software engineering skills
- OKR: Read Clean Code by Robert C. Martin
- OKR: Read Design Patterns by The “Gang of Four”
- OKR: Read Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture by Martin Fowler
Deepen my mindfulness practice
- Meditate more (aim for once a day; consistency matters more than duration)
  - Habit: Use Headspace to meditate every day shortly after waking up
Improve my relationship with my immediate family
- Habit: Call each family member weekly
Read more
- Habit: Read at least 2 pages a day
- Habit: Each morning after I make my bed, make sure my Kindle is charged and place it on my pillow.
- Habit: Every evening, get in bed 30 minutes before my actual intended bedtime. Before I remove my Kindle from my pillow, make sure to read a few pages.

I’ve intentionally tried to prune many of my goals to make more space for these things, and to clear some space for purpose work:

I’m scaling down my commitment to political activity between now and November 3
I’m putting writing down entirely for the rest of the year. (With the understanding that the purpose work will likely involve a lot of writing, however.)
I’m going to stop expecting that I’ll have 2-3 hours each weekend to work on a growth-related engineering project.
I’m taking myself off the hook for adding even more Japanese cards each day, since my current method seems to mostly be getting me where I want (i.e. an increasingly large vocabulary in Japanese so that I can hopefully start to have a contextual net for understanding basic conversations)

As I begin to reclaim my weekends, I’m hoping that time to call my family and time to read software-related books also begins to return.

Otherwise, I think getting back on track for meditation and reading physical books is going to require that I get much more disciplined about building a consistent morning and evening routine.

So far this year, I’ve kept my routine pretty flexible, and especially since I’ve stayed up late working, I’ve also tended to start waking up later and later. Together, these two trends mean that I don’t consistently end up having time in the morning to do self-care habits like meditation, and I also don’t end up consistently having time in the evening for reading.

This probably isn’t the first time I’ve said it, but I think I need to get to a point where a set of habits in the morning and a set of habits in the evening become near-automatic. I also need to be disciplined about not letting work (or play, but more often work) bleed into bedtime, since allowing this to happen is almost always a trap that just leaves me feeling more tired and less productive the next day, even if it does lead to my wrapping something up “sooner”.

Here’s a concrete sample of what my ideal morning routine looks like, assuming that I need to start work around 7:30am:

Wake up at 6:30am semi-naturally after 7.5 – 8 hours of sleep
[10 min] Meditate for 10 minutes
[15 min] Use the bathroom, brush my teeth, wash my face
[5 min] Weigh myself and take my morning vitamins
1. [10 min] Friday only: take body circumference measurements
[5 min] Make my bed, get dressed
[5 min] Grab tea and water before sitting down at my desk
[10 min] Time-boxed journaling with a particular focus on:
1. Anything I remember about my dreams
2. Gratitude
3. Any particularly complicated thoughts or emotions that need deeper exploration
Start clearing inboxes and catching up on any potentially urgent messages or requests

To match that, my minimal evening routine should generally look something like this, assuming I need to be in bed by 10:30pm and asleep by 11:00pm:

[10 min] By 10pm at the latest, review the day and plan for tomorrow
Shut down my laptop
[5 min] Brush my teeth and wash my face, put on pajamas
Get in bed
[10 min] Read in bed

Here’s an outline of what a typical work day might look like for me this quarter:

6:30am: Wake up
6:30am – 7:30am: Complete morning routine
7:30am – 11:00am: Morning work session
11:00am – 11:30am: Daily Anki review session (1 of 3)
11:30am – 12:00pm: Lunch
12:00pm – 12:30pm: Daily Anki review session (2 of 3)
12:30pm – 4:30pm: Afternoon work session
MWF:
1. 4:30pm – 6:30pm: Exercise + Shower (Potentially a 5pm CrossFit class)
TTh:
1. 4:30pm – 6:15pm: Extended Afternoon work session OR use this time for lunch / coffee with a friend or to catch-up with someone via video chat.
2. 6:15pm – 6:30pm: Shower
6:30pm – 7:00pm: Daily Anki review session (3 of 3)
7:00pm – 7:45pm: Dinner
7:45pm – 9:00pm: Evening work session
9:00pm – 10:00pm: Free time, or extended evening work session as needed
1. I suspect I will sometimes swap this up into the afternoon, to play a round or two of games with a friend during evening PST before he goes to bed.
10:00pm – 10:30pm: Complete evening routine
10:30pm: Get in bed
11:00pm: Sleep

Outside of the morning and evening routines, this is more meant to be a guideline than a strict schedule, so I at least have a sense of how my day should generally fit together.

This gives me a total of ~8.5 hours of work on days with exercise, and ~10.25 hours of work on days without exercise for an average daily load of 9.2 hours, which feels more than reasonable, and should leave me with enough time during a typical week to satisfy my consulting obligations and my coaching obligations. When work is busier, I can use the ~hour of free time each day to get a little more productive time for an average daily load of 10.2 hours, but for sanity’s sake, and so that this entire schedule has some buffer most days, I should aim to avoid that in the general case.

Adjusted Method: Exercise and Diet

Last quarter I stuck to the Slow-Carb Diet and was doing StrongLifts 5×5 ~3 times/week. I also started regular supplementation with vitamins (multi-vitamin, fish oil, magnesium, vitamin C) and creatine.

So far, SCD is still generally working well for me, and I think I’ll plan to keep it around for at least the next quarter. I’m super used to this, and I think it provides me a generally good, and generally healthy balance that doesn’t leave me feeling deprived.

I did, however, not make a lot of gains wrt my weight and body fat this quarter. I suspect the real difference here is going from burning a huge amount of calories in cardio virtually every day while training for a half marathon to being relatively sedentary, and just lifting heavy 3 days a week.

I’m also concerned that I’m getting injured in the gym a lot more lately. I haven’t had any major injuries, but this quarter, I had a brief issue with my knee, and twice strained one of my shoulders. I’m 95% sure that the issue here has been that I’ve been too lazy to properly stretch and warm-up before lifting heavier, but I think it would be good to have some form of coaching to help me ensure I’m lifting with proper form.

To solve both problems, I’m thinking I may finally spring for CrossFit this quarter, and give that a try for a few months. In the past I’ve been a little stingy about jumping for this, since it is a little on the expensive side–$300+ for coaching before I can join group classes at a rate of ~$200/mo.

Since I’m generally spending $60/mo or less on the gym, this is a pretty big price hike… but my previous experience with CrossFit in Colombia was very positive, and I do feel like CrossFit offers a good mix of weightlifting, HIIT, and endurance cardio, which is exactly what I’m looking for. The workouts are also super time efficient–done in an hour and I never feel anything other than super accomplished for finishing the workout.

Summarized Q4 Goals

Launch a successful project
- OKR: Complete The Spike Lab purpose and identity exercises for myself
- OKR: Brainstorm at least 100 project ideas related to my purpose, identities, and interests
- OKR: Identify 2-3 projects to explore and prototype starting in 2021
- Habit: Work on projects 6 hours a day
Grow my consulting business
- OKR: Obtain a glowing review / referral from Karat
Improve my software engineering skills
- OKR: Read Clean Code by Robert C. Martin
- OKR: Read Design Patterns by The “Gang of Four”
- OKR: Read Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture by Martin Fowler
Language learning
- Learn Japanese
  - OKR: Memorize the first 600-1000 most common words in Japanese.
  - Habit: Add 3 new Japanese Core 10k sentences each day
  - Habit: Every day, make grammar and example sentence flashcards for 1 already-completed Duolingo lesson
- Learn Chinese
  - OKR: Spend 3 months in Chinese-speaking countries
  - OKR: Complete the Duolingo Chinese program
  - OKR: Reach 3000 words in Chinese
  - Habit: Add at least 30 new Chinese Anki cards a day for the duration of my stay in Taiwan
  - Habit: Complete 1 Duolingo Chinese lesson daily
- Habit: Complete Anki reviews daily.
Improve my health
- Get back into shape
  - Get lean
    - Reach 10% body fat
      - Habit: Measure body composition every day so I can tell if current efforts are working
    - Habit: Take a full set of body circumference measurements once a week
  - OKR: Find a training program I feel I can trust and stick to it unless body composition results show I’m not moving toward where I want to go. Re-evaluate programs every ~12 weeks.
  - OKR: Find a diet plan and stick to it long enough to evaluate results.
  - Habit: Exercise at least 3 days a week
Learn to talk to attractive women
- OKR: Delete all dating apps, and don’t use them for the entire year
Read more
- OKR: Read 52 books
- Learn to speed read
  - OKR: Eliminate subvocalization while reading
  - Habit: For at least 3 months, spend 10 minutes using speed reading training software each day
  - Habit: Take a reading speed test every week or two to measure progress
- Habit: Read at least 2 pages a day
- Habit: Each morning after I make my bed, make sure my Kindle is charged and place it on my pillow.
- Habit: Every evening, get in bed 30 minutes before my actual intended bedtime. Before I remove my Kindle from my pillow, make sure to read a few pages.
Deepen my mindfulness practice
- Meditate more (aim for once a day; consistency matters more than duration)
  - Habit: Use Headspace to meditate every day shortly after waking up
Improve my relationship with my immediate family
- OKR: Find an online therapist I like to help me navigate difficult emotional issues involving family relationships
- Habit: Call each family member weekly
- Habit: Discuss progress on family relationships with a therapist weekly
Become more politically active
- Habit: Spend 1-4 hours each week on political activities until November 3rd

Summarized Q4 Habits and OKRs

Habits:

Daily
- Work on projects 6 hours a day
- Use Headspace to meditate every day shortly after waking up
- Anki
  - Complete Anki reviews
  - Add 30 new Chinese Anki cards
  - Add 3 new Japanese Core 10k sentences
- Habit: Complete 1 Duolingo Chinese lesson daily
- Make grammar and example sentence flashcards for 1 already-completed Duolingo Japanese lesson
- Read 2 pages a day
- After I make my bed, make sure my Kindle is charged and place it on my pillow
- Every evening, get in bed 30 minutes before my actual intended bedtime. Before I remove my Kindle from my pillow, make sure to read a few pages
- For at least 3 months, spend 10 minutes using speed training software
- Measure body composition
Weekly
- Exercise at least 3 days a week
- Take a full set of body circumference measurements once a week on Friday
- Call each family member
- Discuss progress on family relationships with a therapist
- Spend 1-4 hours on political activities

OKRs:

Launch a successful project
- Complete The Spike Lab purpose and identity exercises
- Brainstorm at least 100 project ideas related to my purpose, identities, and interests
- Identify 2-3 projects to explore and prototype starting in 2021
Grow my consulting business
- Obtain a glowing review / referral from Karat
Improve my software engineering skills
- Read Clean Code by Robert C. Martin
- Read Design Patterns by The “Gang of Four”
- Read Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture by Martin Fowler
Learn Chinese
- Spend 3 months in Chinese-speaking countries
- Reach 3000 words in Chinese
- Complete the Duolingo Chinese program
Learn Japanese
- Memorize the first 600-1000 most common words in Japanese
Get back into shape
- Reach 10% body fat
- Find a training program I feel I can trust and stick to it unless body composition results show I’m not moving toward where I want to go. Re-evaluate programs every ~12 weeks.
- Find a diet plan and stick to it long enough to evaluate results.
Learn to talk to attractive women
- Delete all dating apps, and don’t use them for the entire year
Read more
- Read 52 books
- Eliminate subvocalization while reading
Improve my relationship with my immediate family
- Find an online therapist I like to help me navigate difficult emotional issues